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Zubon comments on A Proposal for Defeating Moloch in the Prison Industrial Complex - Less Wrong Discussion
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The elephant in the room is that the US has radically higher incarnation rates than every other country. If you want to reform the systems it's worth paying attention to how the US system differs and what it does to get higher incarnation rates.
That sounds plausible at first glance but it might be more complicated. Have you looked in more detail about how prisons are currently payed?
Prisons itself don't want anything. There managers have interests. There are also workers. The union of those workers has political interests.
It's not that easy to get data about this but as far as I understand prison workers unions are a significant political player in the US.
An incomplete accounting suggests that prison guard unions outspend private prisons, which could reverse "This incentive is strong for public prisons and doubly strong for private prisons." So whatever negative effects one expected from private prison political advocacy, at least double that. (The important part isn't "sides" on that but rather the magnitude of political lobbying.)
(I feel I should note that public unions will spend effort lobbying to increase workers' share of the prison costs, not just to increase the number of prisoners or guard jobs. I could not tell you the breakdown between advocacy for "tough on crime" and for more pension protection.)
Workers that are union members. I don't know whether a CBT therapist would be included. If a prison suddenly starts hiring all sorts of specialists that aren't prison guards and pays it's money to them, the prison guard union might not like that.
To make the whole proposal more target, we might switch from paying the full bonus to the prison and pay half of it to the prison and the other half to the employees directly.